How Does Ralph Ellison Use Racial Injustice In Invisible Man

Invisible Man,by Ralph Ellison, is story of a young African-American man maturing and changing into his own man. The unnamed narrator tries to maneuver through life with all of the trials and tribulations of being black in the early 1900’s. The story starts in Harlem as an older version of our protagonist is telling the audience that he is an invisible man. Ellison writes, “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. ...I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,”(Ellison, 3). He then starts to recount all the events that led him to his present point, starting in high school. As he is about to graduate high school, the narrator attends a party to read his graduation speech. Before he reads, however, there is a “battle royal” where numerous young, black boys fight for the amusement of the whites. The narrator is forced to join in and fight. This whole traumatizing experience is made better because he gets a scholarship to an all-black college. This event represents his early self and how all of the racial injustice that happens to him is less important than an education, and in

But from what I could find, there were reviews that said that Ellison being black did not take away from the novel. The New Republic magazine, in a reissue of a 1952 review, said, “it can be said of Ralph Ellison that he is not a Negro writer, but a writer who happens to be a Negro,”(Mayberry, 1). And Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote, “Invisible Man is tough, brutal and sensational. It is uneven in quality. But it blazes with authentic talent. No one interested in books by or about American Negroes should miss it,”(Prescott, 1). These reviews show that Ellison being an African-American in the 1940’s did not take away from the book, and the novel was still judged on its